The 2010 Awards

The second Awards ceremony for the European Week for Waste Reduction 2010 took place on 28th March 2011 in Brussels before roughly 200 attendees, including the Brussels-Capital Region Minister for the Environment Evelyne Huytebroeck and several representatives of the European Commission and the LIFE+ Programme.

The ceremony rewarded the most outstanding awareness raising actions implemented during the 2010 EWWR. During the EWWR 2010 (20 – 28 November 2010), 4346 actions were carried out in 22 European countries and 2 Latino-American countries. Out of these, 90 were pre-selected by the various Organisers and submitted to an independent jury. You can see images of the actions that were implemented in 2010 in our picture and video galleries. The following actions were awarded:

Administration & public authority: Better than new: 100% old campaign - Environmental Authority of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (Catalonia, Spain) - A broad waste prevention campaign carried out across the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, which promotes various strategies, including repair and reuse, responsible consumption, preference for tap water and composting.

Association & NGO: Responsible purchase - Ecoscience Provence (France) - A campaign implemented in collaboration with several supermarkets to encourage consumers to reduce waste by purchasing products with less packaging.

Business & industry: Reduction of glass packaging in the wine sector - Codorniu Group (Catalonia, Spain) - A project that proved it is possible to reduce the weight of the glass in cava (sparkling wine) bottles by 11%, thus reducing the amount of waste and CO2 emissions, without negative impact on sales.

Educational establishment: Food Waste Reduction Challenge - St Mary’s Episcopal Primary School (Scotland, UK) - A project to reduce the amount of food and packaging wasted from lunches served from the school canteen and packed lunches that the children bring from home by collecting and weighing waste at the end of every lunchtime.

Other: Malta Reuse Map - Elisa Andretti (with the support of the University of Malta) (Malta) - A project to create a sustainable market for reclaimed building materials in Malta, and to provide an instrument which could promote the creativity of people through the use of dismissed materials while raising awareness about the use of our limited resource and how this can also reduce waste.

The Jury’s favourite: Waste Watchers - AERESS (Spain), in collaboration with RREUSE (European Coordination) - The Spanish branch of a pan-European initiative, which consists in collecting old items no longer wanted by their owners and reselling them in reuse centres that weigh and communicate the amount of items they sell, i.e. the amount of waste avoided.

The Awards were handed out by Mr. William Neale, member of the Cabinet of the EU Commissioner for the Environment Mr. Janez Potočnik. Mr Potočnik had planned to attend, but was prevented from attending the ceremony by other commitments. He expressed his support to the EWWR through a video message that was shown at the end of the Ceremony.

The Jury

The jury included European waste management specialists representing each category of Project developers. For the edition 2010 of the EWWR, it was composed of the following persons:

Administration & public Autority: Carsten Brauns, Committee of the Regions